Abstract
Differentiation or alterity – often expressed as “the other” – are terms that have been a preoccupation for much of French philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century. A number of scholars have attributed the theme of otherness – with both its positive and negative connotations – to the combined influence of G.W. Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (e.g., Schrift 2006; Baugh 2003). Different philosophers will, of course, make somewhat idiosyncratic appropriations and combinations in their particular interpretations of the mode of otherness, thus preventing any cohesive definition or consistent usage of its terminology – though indeed certain overlaps do occur. All of the philosophers who feature in this volume have engaged with variant understandings of the idea of otherness.
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Notes
- 1.
Levinas also refers in this same interview to his first essay on Husserl, published in 1929, when he was 22, in Revue Philosophique: “On the Ideas of Edmund Husserl.” This has recently been republished in Discovering Existence with Husserl (1998 [1967]). His doctoral thesis The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, was defended in 1930 at the University of Strasbourg. It was published in English in 1973.
- 2.
Levinas further elaborates elsewhere: “There is a reflection upon oneself that wants to be radical. It does not only take into consideration that which is intended by consciousness. From this moment on, the object in phenomenology is reconstituted in its world and in all the forgotten intentions of the thinking that absorbed itself into it. It is a manner of thinking concretely. There is in this manner a rigor, but also an appeal to listen acutely for what is implicit” (2001: 93–94).
- 3.
Levinas expands on his initial reaction to Heidegger and his work: “The entire book, Being and Time, was so extraordinary, because this being abandoned to Being, this care for being, leads indeed to the way in which everything possesses meaning. In 1927 it appeared to us as if he were beginning with a kind of Darwinian struggle for existence” (2001: 136).
- 4.
Levinas later describes this work in relation to his disagreements with Heidegger. “This theme is already formulated in Existence and Existents. It is my first book, a taking up in another form of De l’évasion. This horror of anonymous being, obsession with this anonymity, this unceasingness; a bit like the nothing that annihilates (why does it not stay calm?). And already the radical difference is outlined, that which I will later call the fundamental dissymmetry between me and the other” (2001: 46).
- 5.
Another criticism that Levinas makes of Heidegger concerns his preoccupation with one’s own being. “But what does fearing for the other mean in his theory of Befindlichkeit? To me, it is an essential moment.… Fearing for the other doesn’t enter into the Heideggerean analysis of Befindlichkeit because in that theory – a very admirable theory of double intentionality – all emotion, all fear, is finally emotion for oneself, fear for oneself” (2001: 177).
- 6.
Levinas elaborates on the shortcomings of phenomenology in this connection. “Phenomenological description … whatever analysis of the relationship with the other, it may contribute, will not suffice. Qua phenomenology it remains within … the world of the solitary ego which has no relationship with the other qua other, for whom the other is another one, an alter ego known by sympathy, that is, by a return to oneself” (1978 [1947]: 85).
- 7.
Even one of Levinas’s translators acknowledges this that Levinas himself is not entirely consistent in his use of a/autre and A/Autrui. In my usage of o/Other, I have tried to keep faithful to the context in which the term is used by either Levinas or those who quote from him.
- 8.
In Kojève’s interpretation of the master-slave relationship in Hegel, human interaction was depicted as a battle unto death. However, on the wider social and political stage as distinct from the personal level, as Baugh describes it: “The ‘fight-to-the-death’ is merely a stage of inter-subjective relations; it is transcended in work and humanity’s technological mastery of nature… which ushers in the universal homogeneous stage, … a classless society comprising the whole of humanity.” [Kojève 1946: 354–356] (Baugh 2003: 99).
- 9.
Baugh does admit, however: “It is certainly possible that Sartre read the important chapter on master and slave when it appeared in Mesures (January 1939)” (Baugh 2003: 98).
- 10.
There is a less absolutist stance on Sartre’s work when he became more Marxist and also endeavored to develop an ethics that acknowledged the exploited status of many people.
- 11.
In his posthumously published, Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre admits that the quest for absolute freedom is an unrealistic one and that one needs to acknowledge the vulnerability of others. He states: “The other’s end can appear to me as an end only in and through the indication of my adopting that end. In choosing to help someone, I engage myself in action, but still recognize the end as not mine. To will this end in ‘good faith’ I must will the end to be realized by another.” (Sartre 1992: 277–280)
- 12.
See Ricoeur the chapter on Ricoeur earlier in the volume for further details of his wartime detainment.
- 13.
In Oneself as Another Ricoeur depicts a multifaceted reading of otherness, which he understands broadly as those dimensions of the world which can evade our conscious and/or voluntary control – and thus provide evidence not just of human fragility but also introduces questions regarding any façade of mastery. Under the heading of the involuntary, Ricoeur situates the body and conscience as well as relations with other human beings (1992: 317–356). I will restrict myself in this context to the relation to other persons.
- 14.
It is in this sense with his emphasis on the uniqueness and irreducibility of the other person that I believe Ricoeur surpasses the basic maneuvers of the Hegelian dialectic in its later form. Indeed, Ricoeur often refers to Hegel’s early Jena writings where he did allow for human love between a man and woman as an illustration of the dialectic. It is to this dimension of Hegel that Ricoeur appeals rather than to Phenomemology of Spirit or his later political works (1992: 296).
- 15.
Ricoeur voices his own appraisal of this postulate of “appresentation.” “Husserl gave the name ‘appresentation’ to this givenness in order to express, on the one hand, that unlike representations in signs or images, the givenness of the other is an authentic givenness and, on the other hand, that unlike the originary, immediate givenness of the flesh to itself, the givenness of the other never allows me to live the experience of others and, in this sense, can never be converted into originary presentation” (1992: 333). Ricoeur regards this negatively.
- 16.
Ricoeur expands on his objections in Oneself as Another: “Like each of us, he [Husserl] understands, prior to any philosophy, the word ‘other’ as meaning other than me. Having said this, the fifth meditation [Cartesian meditations] stems from the bold stroke of the preceding meditation, a stroke by which the mediating ego reduces this common knowledge to the status of a prejudice, and so holds it to be unfounded. The mediating ego will therefore begin by suspending, hence by rendering entirely problematic, all that ordinary experience owes to others in order to discern that which, in experience reduced to the sphere of ownness, makes the positioning of others just as apodictic as the positioning of itself. Thus movement of thought is entirely comparable to Descartes’s hyperbolic doubt” (1992: 331).
- 17.
Derrida describes the location of this otherness: “[T]his otherness is not necessarily something which comes to Greek philosophy from ‘outside,’ that is, from the non-Hellenic work. From the beginnings of Greek philosophy, the self-identity of the Logos is already fissured and divided. I think one can discern signs of such fissures of ‘différance’ in every great philosopher: the ‘Good beyond Being’ (epikeina tes ousias) of Plato’s Republic, for example, or the confrontation with the ‘Stranger’ in The Sophist are already traces of an alterity which refuses to be totally domesticated” (Derrida in Kearney 1984: 117).
- 18.
There are echoes of Levinas in this statement. While initially Derrida seemed to defend Husserl against Levinas’s criticisms of him, by the mid-sixties he had recognized the strength of Levinas’s position on the subject of the other, though he maintained certain reservations and did not accept it in its entirety. As Françoise Dastur states: “In his (quite critical) essay on Levinas, ‘Violence and Métaphysique,’ first published in 1964.… Derrida apparently wanted still to defend Husserl against Levinas.… But in 1967 in Speech and Phenomena, he situates himself no longer inside phenomenology and philosophy, but at the ‘margins’ of them, in proximity both to the Levinasian ‘heterology,’ and to the Heideggerian ‘de-struction’ of onto-theology” (Dastur 2006: 52).
- 19.
Derrida then continues: “But the problem is that such a non-site cannot be defined or situated by means of philosophical language” (1984: 108). A certain distance from philosophy is needed then, so as “to interrogate it” (109).
- 20.
Foucault further notes that: “Christianity, in introducing salvation as salvation beyond this life, will somehow unbalance or at least upset the whole theme of care for self” (1991: 9). It is from this point onwards that care of the self began to be regarded as selfish.
- 21.
Pierre Hadot in Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995) examines the various philosophically inspired forms of self discipline that Greek and Roman thinkers adopted in a pre-Christian era. He did not necessarily agree with Foucault’s adaptation of his ideas, especially those of a contestatory nature.
- 22.
Marion’s theology has been basically described as neo-Platonic in that it basically posits a God that is unknowable. In his work God Without Being ([1982] 1991), Marion posits that it is love alone that will foster a relationship and insight into this dimension that far surpass the claims of reason. It would also seem that there is a Kierkegaardian influence at work here as well.
- 23.
De Beauvoir’s own understanding of otherness in relation to Sartre’s thought including the modes of transcendence do present certain problems of interpretation. See de Beauvoir (1977: 16).
- 24.
Kristeva clarifies this remark also with reference to her reception in the United States. “I believe that much of what has been written in the United States about my conception has been inaccurate. People have either defined and glorified the “semiotic” as if it were a female essence or else claimed that I do not grant enough autonomy to this ‘essence’” (269). For more details on the “semiotic,” see the chapter on Kristeva.
- 25.
Kristeva, interestingly, qualifies this remark with the observation: “But I know that certain American feminists do not think well of such an idea, because they want a positivist notion of woman. But one can be positive starting with this permanent marginality, which is the motor of change” (45).
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Joy, M. (2011). Encountering Otherness. In: Joy, M. (eds) Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion. Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_10
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